Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In early 2011, the Arab Spring was in full bloom. Authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt had been overthrown, Gaddafi was losing his grip on Libya, and mass protests were occurring in Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco and Yemen. Though there were tensions under the surface, Syria seemed immune.

But later that year, on 6 March 2011, the Syrian government arrested a group of children in the southern city of Deraa for spray painting anti-regime graffiti. The children were tortured, and the antigovernment protests that sparked swept across the nation. A month later, hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating across Syria on a daily basis. The Assad regime's brutal crackdown marks the beginning of what is now a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.

This week, sadly, we mark the fifth anniversary of this conflict. Syria is a broken society and a humanitarian disaster. The descent of Syria into a terrible civil war and the making of the largest humanitarian crisis in living memory will have repercussions for decades. Years of development gains have been wound back. Syria has dropped 23 places on the Human Development Index. The life expectancy of ordinary Syrians has dropped by years.

According to a recent report from World Vision, real per capita income in Syria is 45 per cent lower than it would have been in the absence of conflict. Half of Syria's children, 2.8 million children, are not going to school. More than a quarter of Syria's schools—over 6,000—have been damaged by the violence, forced to close, or used for the fighting or for sheltering displaced families. Seventy per cent of Syria is without access to safe drinking water, hospitals are inoperable and in March last year we learnt that the number of night time lights in Syria had decreased by 83 per cent after four years of civil war. Syria has literally been plunged into darkness.

Despite these shocking statistics, there are two things that we need to say very clearly. There is still civil society in Syria. There are Syrians bravely standing up and arguing about the sort of future they want for their country. They are delivering aid; they are struggling against the closed schools, closed hospitals, closed roads to try and bring the necessities of life to people across Syria, including in besieged cities and towns. We need to take a moment to think about those Syrians who are bravely struggling to look after their fellow citizens today, and who are still thinking about the future they want for their country.

The second thing to say is that the international community must do more to help now, and to help in the decades that will follow. Right now, of course, we have seen a momentary cessation of fighting, more or less observed, and some withdrawal of Russian troops. These are slight positive moves in the right direction, and they have to be supported because all of this humanitarian need that I have spoken about will require a political solution before it can be properly addressed. That will take a vast need of international support and Australia, as a good international citizen, must do much more than we have.

During the early years of the Syrian conflict we gave around $100 million in humanitarian aid, when Labor was in government, but as this crisis has worsened Australia has done less. At an international pledging conference in London, earlier this year, the call went out for $10 billion of help. Australia gave just $25 million, where the UK, for example, pledged $2.6 billion. We must do better. Politically, a resolution must be found, but our humanitarian support for this disaster must be greater than it is.